“And that’s all?” she said.
“Absolutely all,” he answered. “I’m afraid it’s disappointing in incident, but it is at any rate truthful.”
“Oh, but it’s adventurous,” she said, “beside mine. There’s nothing for me to tell at all. I’ve simply lived here with father always. There have been no books, no children, nothing at all except father.”
She paused then in rather a curious way. He looked up at her.
“Well?” he said.
“Oh! father’s so different—you never know. Sometimes he’s just as I am, plays and sings and tells stories. And then, oh! he’s such fun. There never was anybody like him. And sometimes he’s very quiet and won’t say anything, and then he always goes away, perhaps it’s only a day or two, and then it’s a week or a month even. And sometimes,” she paused again for a moment, “he’s angry, terribly angry, so that I am awfully frightened.”
“What! with you?” Tony asked indignantly.
“No; with no one exactly, but it’s dreadful. I go and hide.” And then she burst out laughing. “Oh, and once he caught Miss Minns like that, and he pulled her hair and it fell all over her shoulders. Oh! it was so funny. And a lot of it came out altogether; it was false, you know. I think that father is just like a child. He’s ever so much younger than I am really. I’m getting dreadfully old, and he’s as young as can be. He tells stories—beautiful stories! and then he’s cross and he sulks, and sometimes he’s out of doors for days together, and all the animals simply love him.”
All these facts she brought out, as it were, in a bunch, without any very evident connexion, but he felt that the cord that bound them was there and that he could find it one day. But what surprised him most was her curious aloofness from it all, as if he were a friend, perhaps a chum, sometimes a bother and sometimes a danger, but never a father.
“But tell me about yourself,” he said, “what you like and what you do.”